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31_days2008-02-03 09:13 pm
sophiap.livejournal.com) wrote in 31_days2008-02-03 09:13 pm
[Feb. 03] [D.Gray-Man] End of Days, Part 32
Title: End of Days pt. 32
Day/Theme: Feb. 03/Hell hath no limits
Series: D.Gray-Man
Character/Pairing: Ensemble, with a few OCs.
Rating: PG-13
Note: After a much needed break, I was able to get to the next installment. Two, maybe three more chapters to go after this one.
Part 31
After a time, the klaxon eventually stopped. Reever couldn't remember if it had been set to turn itself off after a time.
Maybe it had been turned off because the crisis was over. But how? They only had three exorcists in good health...
"Shit!" He shifted the syringe to his good hand and reached up with the other to rub at his eyes. The exorcists he pictured were not the ones he should have. He forced himself to take count again, picturing each in turn, and trying not to see slightly different faces superimposed over them Klaud and Allen were still in good shape, and Lenalee seemed to be recovering from whatever her innocence had done to her. Cross, Tiedoll and Bookman were still sick, but could probably do something--all of them were distance fighters, after all. Mikhail could help support their movements if they were...
Reever shook his head as if that would dislodge the foreign memory. How did he know that the Russian boy could use his puppetry techniques to help move exorcists who were too weak to move on their own?
He dragged his hand down his face, trying to wipe the fatigue away, while his good hand kept careful hold of the syringe. Couldn't risk dropping that, not until Lavi got here and could tell Reever what his future self was thinking, and what the hell did he mean, good hand? Both hands were just fine, he thought, flexing his right hand and studying it for any sign of injury. Nothing there but the old scar that slashed across the heel of his hand, and that had been there for years, ever since a flawed cathode ray tube had shattered without provocation when he was assisting Professor Thomson with an experiment. He remembered it clearly, remembered the odd sense of hyper-clarity as he watched the blood run down his hand and soak his cuff, and thinking that the professor would be angry at the experiment being disrupted even as Thomson himself calmly and kindly escorted him to the infirmary to have thing stitched up.
So why did he also remember a burn scar that pulled the palm taut and inflexible, and half his ring finger missing? There should also be a scarred patch on his neck from where the molten metal had splashed up and caught him just under the jaw. He flexed his hand over and over, surprised at how fluid the motion was.
Why would he remember an experimental casting for an Innocence weapon. It was based on some theoretical schematics Komui had drawn up on before the higher ups had pegged him as a liability. He wasn't sure what had happened. The Innocence was sinking and stretching into the steel barrel as predicted, but without warning the metal changed from honey-red to a cold, vicious blue-white. Reever pushed Russell aside just in time. Later, when he finally came out from under the sedative, the doctor told that if he hadn't been wearing insulated gloves, he'd have lost more than half a finger and some mobility.
"What the hell?" He sat up straight, cold sweat making his shirt cling to him. None of that had happened, but he remembered every bit of it. The pain, the grogginess and nausea from the sedative. And what the hell was that about Komui, that little bit that had slipped in? Rondine had only told him a few bare facts, but Reever suddenly knew it was much, much worse than he'd imagined. Fragments of arguments and protests flickered at the edges of his mind.
From outside, he heard Kanda asking someone what the hell was going on. One minute the science department was under attack, and the next it wasn't, so would someone kindly tell him what the fuck he was supposed to do?
Miranda slept on, her sleep deep but not peaceful. Her brows were drawn together, forming a sharp crease between. Reever could see the marks in his memory: the worry-line on her forehead, the deep furrows alongside her mouth. They weren't there yet, and neither were the shot, gray-shot curls he thought he could see.
"Did you have any idea this would happen, Miranda?"
Lenalee sat up in the other bed and looked over at them. "What do you think is going to happen now?" she asked in a small, scared voice. Her hands twisted at the hem of the blanket in a way he'd seen dozens of times before.
"I don't know," came both from Reever and a Miranda he could not see. Reever looked over at Lenalee, and noticed that someone had trimmed the burnt, ratty ends of her hair. Her hair was still brutally short, but it was glossy black again and sat close to her head like a silk cap. She was gorgeous, and Reever saw her five year from now, even more gorgeous. His heart ached for it, and he did not know why.
"No one is telling us anything about what happened. Brother, Reever..."
"I'm right here, Lenalee."
"...even Allen is being quiet about it," she said, talking over him as if he wasn't there. "Something happened to the Ark--"
And then Lenalee wasn't there. Reever had seen her run out of the infirmary.
Reever wondered if he should have stopped her.
"I hope she's okay," he told Miranda, even though he wasn't expecting an answer. Still, he thought there might be some part of her that could hear him and would take comfort from a friendly voice.
If he and Lavi were right, the portal her future self had opened was still open, both there and here. That meant, according to Lavi, that the other Miranda was probably just unconscious. Otherwise, the portal would have slammed shut when she died, stranding Rondine and the others here. Or, perhaps snapping them back to their own time with nothing to show for their journey.
If Reever was right, and he told his Doubting Thomas of a future self that he was damn it, the only chance they had of closing the portal was to wake up Miranda--the other Miranda--and get her to undo what she had done.
He twirled the syringe round and round in his left hand, careful not to swing it so hard that any of the stimulant spilled out the tip.
"I hope Lavi gets here soon." Reever almost apologized for what he was planning on doing, but if he did that, he could say goodbye to any chance of actually doing it. "I hope this works, I hope Lavi's right and that waking you up can close this down before things get any worse."
He reached out to brush a stray hair out of Miranda's face, and his memory decided to show him just how much more worse it was going to get.
* * *
Jamie had to leap at the small wooden door as it swung shut behind Walker. She was in mid-air when everything changed. She was no longer leaping at a door, she was hurtling headlong into an empty space where one of the Order hallways had once been. Bits of rubble fell around her and the echoes of the explosion still rang through the air.
There was nothing to break her fall, but she grabbed at a piece of falling rock all the same, every instinct telling her she had to grab onto something.
Her fingers skimmed over the rock, the door slammed on her hand, and she hissed at the pain that pulled her back into this crazy land of doors and rooms. Nothing was broken, but there wasn't much skin to shield bone from wood and she knew her hand would hurt like the Devil's own fire for hours yet.
She pushed open the door, but she paused to look behind her. Stupid thing to do, really; just look at that sot Orpheus and poor old Mrs. Lot. Once again, however, a classical education proved to be a load of rot.
"Well, well... look who's tagged along," she muttered even as she pushed through the door and slammed it shut behind her. "Damned Noah."
She started to run to catch up with Allen "Jackrabbit" Walker, then stumbled and nearly fell when she saw that he was standing still in the middle of a rather posh Georgian parlor. Large Palladian windows looked out over a rolling countryside that was just a little too well-organized and well-balanced to be perfectly natural. Pretty, yes, but clearly someone had thought Mother Nature needed a bit of a polish before she was presentable.
Walker didn't have any interest in the view. He didn't even seem to notice that she'd managed to follow him in here.
"That Noah followed us into this place, this whatever it is, the Ark, right? Thought you might want to know that."
He didn't turn around. Every bit of his attention was focused on the piano that took up one corner of the room. It was ordinary looking enough, for all that the white keys were black and the black ones were right. It wasn't even a grand--just an ordinary looking upright with a tacky little fretwork music rack. The little golden golem sat atop the piano, looking enough like a broody hen that Jamie had to stifle a laugh.
"I don't think she can get in here." He didn't turn around. He kept on staring at the piano as if it were something that had manifested from one of Verne's novels. "I think I'm the only one who can open that door, now."
"Ah. Well, thanks for nearly locking me out there with her, then," she said, deadpan. "But if there's a way in, she'll find it. We've dealt with her before. She's one sneaky bitch."
"That's why I have to close the Ark for good." Walker sounded like someone who was about to go shoot his favorite horse. Yes, there was that fist, clenching and trembling. "The egg is in here, and if we can keep her from getting it, keep the Earl from getting it, we might be able to stop any more Akuma from being created."
The view outside the window changed. Well, some of it did. Instead of a nice, inoffensive landscape, several panes showed a sky grayed out with smoke, with a the remains of a stone wall cutting jagged across it. An Akuma, one of the strange, doll-like Level Fours picked its way through the rubble.
"Doesn't matter," she said, as fascinated by the view as Walker was by the piano. Panes kept changing from landscape to carnage and back again, different ones flickering in and out to show her the hell from which she'd escaped.
The Four, though, that was a new addition. She wondered who was left for it to be going after.
"You had a few good years after the Ark died," she said, watching the Four pick up and discard some crushed remains. Jamie strained to see if she could pick out who it had been, and was relieved when all she could tell was that it was a Finder. She could tell herself it wasn't anyone she knew particularly well.
"Millennium came and went, and everyone thought it was all on the downswing."
"What? What are you talking about? The Millennium's almost two years off," Walker said, finally turning away from the piano.
"Almost three, not almost two," Jamie said, echoing one of her more pedantic instructors. "Millennium doesn't start until 1901--Anno Domini didn't start with year zero. Didn't you pay attention in class?"
Walker just stammered and gaped. Jamie plowed on, hoping that he'd catch on soon because only a few panes in the window now showed sunlight and greenery, and a some of the ones that looked out into her own timeline seemed to be missing their glass.
"In any case, the old bastard managed to come up with new ways of creating Akuma, and all the time he'd also been creating more and more Level Fours from--"
"Level Four? There's a Level Four?" Those silvery gray eyes were wide with shock. Walker looked so damned young, even with that white hair of his. Jamie had been surprised to hear from Rondine that he'd only been thirty-one when he died. The one photograph Jamie had seen of him, she'd have guessed him to be closer to fifty than thirty from the haggard look on his face. Ah, well, she thought. Sic transit gloria parasitic Innocence.
"Over there," she said nodding towards the window and its hellish collage.
Walker of course turned to look, and then Jamie got the pleasure of him looking at her as if she'd just lost her mind. "It's just a garden. I don't see anything out there."
"I'm not a nutter," she said, eyes narrowed and Innocence riding high in her voice. "And I'm no liar."
"I didn't say you were!" he said, holding up his hands in a gesture that was more warding than placating. The golem lifted itself from the top of the piano and flew slow and heavy over towards its master. It hissed at him in passing as if to tell him to calm the hell down. Then it flew straight over to Jamie, bumping against her sternum and again picking at the bandages around her throat.
"Oh, shoo! Shoo, you miserable little pest! Get off!" She pushed at the golem, but it was like trying to push a balloon under water--it kept slipping round the sides of her hands and bobbing back up.
"Tim!" Walker grabbed for its tail, but the golem hiked it way up in a manner that would have presented Walker with a very rude view if it had been in any way biological.
The golem finally got the end of one the bandage pulled free, despite Jamie batting at it (in her defense, the thing kept nipping at her). Then it back-winged, looking entirely too smug, hovering in front of her face. It opened its mouth.
The Innocence at the back of its throat shone and wavered. Jamie felt the Innocence at the base of her throat shimmer in and out of existence, and her heart skipped madly. She gasped for air and collapsed to the floor, barely able to catch herself from falling all the way back.
"Tim! Stop that! You're hurting him!" He jumped for the golem, but it rose just out of reach. "I'm so sorry--I didn't realize Tim still had that. It was supposed to... Tim! Close your mouth and put that away! He's hurting!" He jumped again, and the golem flicked him across the face with its tail.
"She," Jamie said, and for once her voice was light and clear, a fine soprano if it weren't for the weakness in it. "She, not he. Never was much of a looker, but it makes passing easier, I suppose. My name's Jamie Dark."
The quick intake of breath was all she needed to know that Walker had recognized the name.
"That's not possible." He wouldn't look at her. He tried, but every time his eyes met hers, he couldn't hold it. "Jamie would be--"
"A child." She listened to the sound of her own voice. She committed it to memory. "It shouldn't be possible, but it is. That's my father's Innocence in there, isn't it," she said. Then, she put her hand to her throat, cupped slightly so she didn't have to feel that her Innocence was there one moment, gone the next. "Here, too."
The golem closed its mouth and flew back to the piano. It was even more unreadable than ever, with no indication of why it had done what it had done, or if it was pleased with itself for having done so. Maybe it simply had wanted to show off the strange thing it had found. No matter the reason, once it closed its mouth again the warm heaviness and welcome ache of the Innocence returned to Jamie's throat and it stayed there, no wavering, no flickering. She tried not to cry, because she was not the sort of person who cried, not any more.
"How?"
"I don't know. But something's happening, and I keep seeing bits of my own time. We were trying to stop it, and it looks like it all went tits-up." She resisted the temptation to lie back, instead focusing on the window. No more panes had turned from green to gray. Funny, she had always pictured the apocalypse being all flash and fire. Instead, she now pictured the unwholesome brown of battlefield mud and the gray of blasted stone. There wasn't hellfire, there was only a wet, February cold that got into your boots and your bones and stayed there for days.
"You're his daughter, aren't you?" Walker was hesitant, sounding it out. Maybe he was afraid of sounding crazy. "Suman Dark's? I saw you, well, I saw a little girl in his memories. That was you?"
Or maybe it was that he just didn't want to face whatever it was.
"Miranda sent us back," Jamie said, simply. Rondine wasn't there to cuff her on the back of the head, and besides, there wasn't any point in keeping quiet, especially now that she'd spilled as much as she had.
"Oh."
"I wasn't lying when I said things get bad. Destroying the Ark to get rid of the egg only helps us in the short run."
"But even if it's just the short run, maybe it can do us some good. If you're from the future, maybe you can tell us what we need to know to stop the Earl." Walker's attention kept being drawn back to that piano as if it were his long-lost lover. There was something in his face, some ache that she couldn't quite parse.
"Fine. June 1914, have as many people on the ground as you can in Sarajevo. Problem solved," she snapped. Two panes turned from green to gray. "Except where it isn't. I'm not sure what's happening, but every time you act like you talk about closing things off, my horrible, hellish future comes one step closer to reality."
Walker didn't speak for quite some time. He seemed very interested in the tips of his shoes.
"Do you know what being turned into an Akuma does to a soul?" he asked her. He still would not look at her.
"No, but I do know that something like fifty, maybe even a hundred million people were killed by Akuma since 1914."
That got a gratifyingly pained gasp.
"There's hardly anything left of the Order, either. Not by 1918. Don't tell me you can't see what's outside that window?"
Walker turned to look at the window. For a moment, there was no reaction; he was a man looking at a blandly pretty landscape. Then, he bent forward, hand pressed to his left eye.
When he looked up again, a strange, gear-shaped lens covered one eye. Jamie let out a string of curses as the red, inhuman eye looked this way and that, seeming to press up against the back of the lens.
Then, it finally focused on the Level Four picking its way through the rubble of the Order.
"How... No! We were only gone a few minutes!" He stepped back sharply, knocking the piano bench over. Jamie struggled to get to her feet. It was a luxury to feel her heart beating steadily, one she hadn't realized she was taking for granted.
"That's twenty years down the road. I'm not sure why, or how, but whatever it is you're planning on doing is sending us hurtling into hell."
Allen tried to cover his eye. He even sat down on the floor next to Jamie and turned his back to the window, but his head kept whipping round to look, as if pulled by that bizarre eye of his. "Okay! Okay! I won't do it! I won't close off the Ark!"
"Good lad," she said, not so much clapping him on the shoulder as letting hand fall wearily into place. Something seemed to settle back to where it belonged. She looked up at the window expectantly, only to see another pane fade from green to gray.
Part 33 Link goes to my personal journal
Part 1 can be found here. Links at the end of each chapter will take you to the next one.
Day/Theme: Feb. 03/Hell hath no limits
Series: D.Gray-Man
Character/Pairing: Ensemble, with a few OCs.
Rating: PG-13
Note: After a much needed break, I was able to get to the next installment. Two, maybe three more chapters to go after this one.
Part 31
After a time, the klaxon eventually stopped. Reever couldn't remember if it had been set to turn itself off after a time.
Maybe it had been turned off because the crisis was over. But how? They only had three exorcists in good health...
"Shit!" He shifted the syringe to his good hand and reached up with the other to rub at his eyes. The exorcists he pictured were not the ones he should have. He forced himself to take count again, picturing each in turn, and trying not to see slightly different faces superimposed over them Klaud and Allen were still in good shape, and Lenalee seemed to be recovering from whatever her innocence had done to her. Cross, Tiedoll and Bookman were still sick, but could probably do something--all of them were distance fighters, after all. Mikhail could help support their movements if they were...
Reever shook his head as if that would dislodge the foreign memory. How did he know that the Russian boy could use his puppetry techniques to help move exorcists who were too weak to move on their own?
He dragged his hand down his face, trying to wipe the fatigue away, while his good hand kept careful hold of the syringe. Couldn't risk dropping that, not until Lavi got here and could tell Reever what his future self was thinking, and what the hell did he mean, good hand? Both hands were just fine, he thought, flexing his right hand and studying it for any sign of injury. Nothing there but the old scar that slashed across the heel of his hand, and that had been there for years, ever since a flawed cathode ray tube had shattered without provocation when he was assisting Professor Thomson with an experiment. He remembered it clearly, remembered the odd sense of hyper-clarity as he watched the blood run down his hand and soak his cuff, and thinking that the professor would be angry at the experiment being disrupted even as Thomson himself calmly and kindly escorted him to the infirmary to have thing stitched up.
So why did he also remember a burn scar that pulled the palm taut and inflexible, and half his ring finger missing? There should also be a scarred patch on his neck from where the molten metal had splashed up and caught him just under the jaw. He flexed his hand over and over, surprised at how fluid the motion was.
Why would he remember an experimental casting for an Innocence weapon. It was based on some theoretical schematics Komui had drawn up on before the higher ups had pegged him as a liability. He wasn't sure what had happened. The Innocence was sinking and stretching into the steel barrel as predicted, but without warning the metal changed from honey-red to a cold, vicious blue-white. Reever pushed Russell aside just in time. Later, when he finally came out from under the sedative, the doctor told that if he hadn't been wearing insulated gloves, he'd have lost more than half a finger and some mobility.
"What the hell?" He sat up straight, cold sweat making his shirt cling to him. None of that had happened, but he remembered every bit of it. The pain, the grogginess and nausea from the sedative. And what the hell was that about Komui, that little bit that had slipped in? Rondine had only told him a few bare facts, but Reever suddenly knew it was much, much worse than he'd imagined. Fragments of arguments and protests flickered at the edges of his mind.
From outside, he heard Kanda asking someone what the hell was going on. One minute the science department was under attack, and the next it wasn't, so would someone kindly tell him what the fuck he was supposed to do?
Miranda slept on, her sleep deep but not peaceful. Her brows were drawn together, forming a sharp crease between. Reever could see the marks in his memory: the worry-line on her forehead, the deep furrows alongside her mouth. They weren't there yet, and neither were the shot, gray-shot curls he thought he could see.
"Did you have any idea this would happen, Miranda?"
Lenalee sat up in the other bed and looked over at them. "What do you think is going to happen now?" she asked in a small, scared voice. Her hands twisted at the hem of the blanket in a way he'd seen dozens of times before.
"I don't know," came both from Reever and a Miranda he could not see. Reever looked over at Lenalee, and noticed that someone had trimmed the burnt, ratty ends of her hair. Her hair was still brutally short, but it was glossy black again and sat close to her head like a silk cap. She was gorgeous, and Reever saw her five year from now, even more gorgeous. His heart ached for it, and he did not know why.
"No one is telling us anything about what happened. Brother, Reever..."
"I'm right here, Lenalee."
"...even Allen is being quiet about it," she said, talking over him as if he wasn't there. "Something happened to the Ark--"
And then Lenalee wasn't there. Reever had seen her run out of the infirmary.
Reever wondered if he should have stopped her.
"I hope she's okay," he told Miranda, even though he wasn't expecting an answer. Still, he thought there might be some part of her that could hear him and would take comfort from a friendly voice.
If he and Lavi were right, the portal her future self had opened was still open, both there and here. That meant, according to Lavi, that the other Miranda was probably just unconscious. Otherwise, the portal would have slammed shut when she died, stranding Rondine and the others here. Or, perhaps snapping them back to their own time with nothing to show for their journey.
If Reever was right, and he told his Doubting Thomas of a future self that he was damn it, the only chance they had of closing the portal was to wake up Miranda--the other Miranda--and get her to undo what she had done.
He twirled the syringe round and round in his left hand, careful not to swing it so hard that any of the stimulant spilled out the tip.
"I hope Lavi gets here soon." Reever almost apologized for what he was planning on doing, but if he did that, he could say goodbye to any chance of actually doing it. "I hope this works, I hope Lavi's right and that waking you up can close this down before things get any worse."
He reached out to brush a stray hair out of Miranda's face, and his memory decided to show him just how much more worse it was going to get.
* * *
Jamie had to leap at the small wooden door as it swung shut behind Walker. She was in mid-air when everything changed. She was no longer leaping at a door, she was hurtling headlong into an empty space where one of the Order hallways had once been. Bits of rubble fell around her and the echoes of the explosion still rang through the air.
There was nothing to break her fall, but she grabbed at a piece of falling rock all the same, every instinct telling her she had to grab onto something.
Her fingers skimmed over the rock, the door slammed on her hand, and she hissed at the pain that pulled her back into this crazy land of doors and rooms. Nothing was broken, but there wasn't much skin to shield bone from wood and she knew her hand would hurt like the Devil's own fire for hours yet.
She pushed open the door, but she paused to look behind her. Stupid thing to do, really; just look at that sot Orpheus and poor old Mrs. Lot. Once again, however, a classical education proved to be a load of rot.
"Well, well... look who's tagged along," she muttered even as she pushed through the door and slammed it shut behind her. "Damned Noah."
She started to run to catch up with Allen "Jackrabbit" Walker, then stumbled and nearly fell when she saw that he was standing still in the middle of a rather posh Georgian parlor. Large Palladian windows looked out over a rolling countryside that was just a little too well-organized and well-balanced to be perfectly natural. Pretty, yes, but clearly someone had thought Mother Nature needed a bit of a polish before she was presentable.
Walker didn't have any interest in the view. He didn't even seem to notice that she'd managed to follow him in here.
"That Noah followed us into this place, this whatever it is, the Ark, right? Thought you might want to know that."
He didn't turn around. Every bit of his attention was focused on the piano that took up one corner of the room. It was ordinary looking enough, for all that the white keys were black and the black ones were right. It wasn't even a grand--just an ordinary looking upright with a tacky little fretwork music rack. The little golden golem sat atop the piano, looking enough like a broody hen that Jamie had to stifle a laugh.
"I don't think she can get in here." He didn't turn around. He kept on staring at the piano as if it were something that had manifested from one of Verne's novels. "I think I'm the only one who can open that door, now."
"Ah. Well, thanks for nearly locking me out there with her, then," she said, deadpan. "But if there's a way in, she'll find it. We've dealt with her before. She's one sneaky bitch."
"That's why I have to close the Ark for good." Walker sounded like someone who was about to go shoot his favorite horse. Yes, there was that fist, clenching and trembling. "The egg is in here, and if we can keep her from getting it, keep the Earl from getting it, we might be able to stop any more Akuma from being created."
The view outside the window changed. Well, some of it did. Instead of a nice, inoffensive landscape, several panes showed a sky grayed out with smoke, with a the remains of a stone wall cutting jagged across it. An Akuma, one of the strange, doll-like Level Fours picked its way through the rubble.
"Doesn't matter," she said, as fascinated by the view as Walker was by the piano. Panes kept changing from landscape to carnage and back again, different ones flickering in and out to show her the hell from which she'd escaped.
The Four, though, that was a new addition. She wondered who was left for it to be going after.
"You had a few good years after the Ark died," she said, watching the Four pick up and discard some crushed remains. Jamie strained to see if she could pick out who it had been, and was relieved when all she could tell was that it was a Finder. She could tell herself it wasn't anyone she knew particularly well.
"Millennium came and went, and everyone thought it was all on the downswing."
"What? What are you talking about? The Millennium's almost two years off," Walker said, finally turning away from the piano.
"Almost three, not almost two," Jamie said, echoing one of her more pedantic instructors. "Millennium doesn't start until 1901--Anno Domini didn't start with year zero. Didn't you pay attention in class?"
Walker just stammered and gaped. Jamie plowed on, hoping that he'd catch on soon because only a few panes in the window now showed sunlight and greenery, and a some of the ones that looked out into her own timeline seemed to be missing their glass.
"In any case, the old bastard managed to come up with new ways of creating Akuma, and all the time he'd also been creating more and more Level Fours from--"
"Level Four? There's a Level Four?" Those silvery gray eyes were wide with shock. Walker looked so damned young, even with that white hair of his. Jamie had been surprised to hear from Rondine that he'd only been thirty-one when he died. The one photograph Jamie had seen of him, she'd have guessed him to be closer to fifty than thirty from the haggard look on his face. Ah, well, she thought. Sic transit gloria parasitic Innocence.
"Over there," she said nodding towards the window and its hellish collage.
Walker of course turned to look, and then Jamie got the pleasure of him looking at her as if she'd just lost her mind. "It's just a garden. I don't see anything out there."
"I'm not a nutter," she said, eyes narrowed and Innocence riding high in her voice. "And I'm no liar."
"I didn't say you were!" he said, holding up his hands in a gesture that was more warding than placating. The golem lifted itself from the top of the piano and flew slow and heavy over towards its master. It hissed at him in passing as if to tell him to calm the hell down. Then it flew straight over to Jamie, bumping against her sternum and again picking at the bandages around her throat.
"Oh, shoo! Shoo, you miserable little pest! Get off!" She pushed at the golem, but it was like trying to push a balloon under water--it kept slipping round the sides of her hands and bobbing back up.
"Tim!" Walker grabbed for its tail, but the golem hiked it way up in a manner that would have presented Walker with a very rude view if it had been in any way biological.
The golem finally got the end of one the bandage pulled free, despite Jamie batting at it (in her defense, the thing kept nipping at her). Then it back-winged, looking entirely too smug, hovering in front of her face. It opened its mouth.
The Innocence at the back of its throat shone and wavered. Jamie felt the Innocence at the base of her throat shimmer in and out of existence, and her heart skipped madly. She gasped for air and collapsed to the floor, barely able to catch herself from falling all the way back.
"Tim! Stop that! You're hurting him!" He jumped for the golem, but it rose just out of reach. "I'm so sorry--I didn't realize Tim still had that. It was supposed to... Tim! Close your mouth and put that away! He's hurting!" He jumped again, and the golem flicked him across the face with its tail.
"She," Jamie said, and for once her voice was light and clear, a fine soprano if it weren't for the weakness in it. "She, not he. Never was much of a looker, but it makes passing easier, I suppose. My name's Jamie Dark."
The quick intake of breath was all she needed to know that Walker had recognized the name.
"That's not possible." He wouldn't look at her. He tried, but every time his eyes met hers, he couldn't hold it. "Jamie would be--"
"A child." She listened to the sound of her own voice. She committed it to memory. "It shouldn't be possible, but it is. That's my father's Innocence in there, isn't it," she said. Then, she put her hand to her throat, cupped slightly so she didn't have to feel that her Innocence was there one moment, gone the next. "Here, too."
The golem closed its mouth and flew back to the piano. It was even more unreadable than ever, with no indication of why it had done what it had done, or if it was pleased with itself for having done so. Maybe it simply had wanted to show off the strange thing it had found. No matter the reason, once it closed its mouth again the warm heaviness and welcome ache of the Innocence returned to Jamie's throat and it stayed there, no wavering, no flickering. She tried not to cry, because she was not the sort of person who cried, not any more.
"How?"
"I don't know. But something's happening, and I keep seeing bits of my own time. We were trying to stop it, and it looks like it all went tits-up." She resisted the temptation to lie back, instead focusing on the window. No more panes had turned from green to gray. Funny, she had always pictured the apocalypse being all flash and fire. Instead, she now pictured the unwholesome brown of battlefield mud and the gray of blasted stone. There wasn't hellfire, there was only a wet, February cold that got into your boots and your bones and stayed there for days.
"You're his daughter, aren't you?" Walker was hesitant, sounding it out. Maybe he was afraid of sounding crazy. "Suman Dark's? I saw you, well, I saw a little girl in his memories. That was you?"
Or maybe it was that he just didn't want to face whatever it was.
"Miranda sent us back," Jamie said, simply. Rondine wasn't there to cuff her on the back of the head, and besides, there wasn't any point in keeping quiet, especially now that she'd spilled as much as she had.
"Oh."
"I wasn't lying when I said things get bad. Destroying the Ark to get rid of the egg only helps us in the short run."
"But even if it's just the short run, maybe it can do us some good. If you're from the future, maybe you can tell us what we need to know to stop the Earl." Walker's attention kept being drawn back to that piano as if it were his long-lost lover. There was something in his face, some ache that she couldn't quite parse.
"Fine. June 1914, have as many people on the ground as you can in Sarajevo. Problem solved," she snapped. Two panes turned from green to gray. "Except where it isn't. I'm not sure what's happening, but every time you act like you talk about closing things off, my horrible, hellish future comes one step closer to reality."
Walker didn't speak for quite some time. He seemed very interested in the tips of his shoes.
"Do you know what being turned into an Akuma does to a soul?" he asked her. He still would not look at her.
"No, but I do know that something like fifty, maybe even a hundred million people were killed by Akuma since 1914."
That got a gratifyingly pained gasp.
"There's hardly anything left of the Order, either. Not by 1918. Don't tell me you can't see what's outside that window?"
Walker turned to look at the window. For a moment, there was no reaction; he was a man looking at a blandly pretty landscape. Then, he bent forward, hand pressed to his left eye.
When he looked up again, a strange, gear-shaped lens covered one eye. Jamie let out a string of curses as the red, inhuman eye looked this way and that, seeming to press up against the back of the lens.
Then, it finally focused on the Level Four picking its way through the rubble of the Order.
"How... No! We were only gone a few minutes!" He stepped back sharply, knocking the piano bench over. Jamie struggled to get to her feet. It was a luxury to feel her heart beating steadily, one she hadn't realized she was taking for granted.
"That's twenty years down the road. I'm not sure why, or how, but whatever it is you're planning on doing is sending us hurtling into hell."
Allen tried to cover his eye. He even sat down on the floor next to Jamie and turned his back to the window, but his head kept whipping round to look, as if pulled by that bizarre eye of his. "Okay! Okay! I won't do it! I won't close off the Ark!"
"Good lad," she said, not so much clapping him on the shoulder as letting hand fall wearily into place. Something seemed to settle back to where it belonged. She looked up at the window expectantly, only to see another pane fade from green to gray.
Part 33 Link goes to my personal journal
Part 1 can be found here. Links at the end of each chapter will take you to the next one.